What's the big idea?

We mistake political economy and strategy for narrative.

To deny that renewable energy technologies are being attacked and thwarted with every tool at the U.S. government's disposal would be to deny reality. There's some nuance there among technologies, some gradient to the overall impact, but none are truly spared. I've seen a lot of analysis about where we went wrong, speculation about how externalities shaped the outcome, but the fundamental political theory that if you create enough jobs in conservative states you will create political durability didn't play out as expected.

Winning in politics today is about who has the best story, and making that story the dominant narrative. Full stop.

If a tree falls in the woods

How much money did renewable energy advocates spend making sure that every resident of Georgia, Arizona, and North Carolina knew exactly how many manufacturing jobs and state revenues were created by the IRA?

How much do you think was spent on making sure the politicians representing those districts knew these figures? If I had to guess, industry and advocacy organizations spend at least 10x more on communicating with policymakers than they do to reach and message the general public.

What if we had sold the benefits of the IRA harder to the public?

I wonder if the renewable energy industry made the same mistake that former U.S.A.I.D. communication chief lamented in his New York Times Op-Ed. This was a bit of a gut punch:

"[…] the biggest reason we never got the story out is that the American public was never U.S.A.I.D.’s primary audience.

Instead, a majority of our communication efforts were aimed entirely at Congress and other government insiders. This was our choice.

Our flawed logic was that if lawmakers understood the agency’s impact, they’d protect its work.

They did, at least, understand. Members of Congress and their staffs regularly joined delegations overseas. They met U.S.A.I.D. staff members, received private briefings and toured lifesaving projects."

Yikes. Lawmakers understand well the moral weight of our support to the people of war-torn countries, suffering famine. But they bet that their constituents did not feel or understand that weight. And they were right.

We bet that lawmakers would fear the wrath of their constituents for killing jobs, but they either fear the wrath of President Trump more (entirely possible) or they don't believe most of their constituents know, or care.

How to win for real

Talking points evaporate without a strong cultural narrative grounding them. Political durability in the current paradigm can only exist where we have broad public agreement on an issue that most people can relate to personally or emotionally.  It is possible to shift these narratives on a large scale with surprisingly few resources, especially in this moment, if you have the right coalition and a winning story.

Jigar Shah has been on his soapbox lately about this issue, and I love to see it.  He makes a strong argument for how important it is for us to do this work on Akshat Rathi 's Zero: The Climate Race podcast, and in his latest newsletter.

Consider some of the biggest domestic policy shifts over the last two decades. The Affordable Care Act under the Obama Administration was the biggest change to American healthcare in half a century and was highly politicized. Yet to this day, one aspect of the Affordable Care Act remains a sacred cow in the eyes of the public (and therefore remains intact): the pre-existing condition mandate.

Prior to the Affordable Care Act, private insurance companies were allowed to deny coverage for medical conditions that existed prior to enrollment. Most Americans with healthcare coverage receive it via their employer, with no control over whether the private insurance company would change from year to year. People with life threatening and chronic diseases were often left without coverage for expensive medical support. With the passage of the Affordable Care Act, private insurers are no longer permitted to deny coverage on this basis.

Fun-size candy bars

The pre-existing condition mandate has won near-universal public support because enough people have a personal connection to health care costs and insurance denials to care about it deeply. It's simple, three words, easy to understand and to relate directly to an outcome.

Most Americans hate the way our health care system works broadly, but it's such a big and complex thing. Potential solutions cannot easily be understood or argued by those outside that system, so it's easy to generate disagreement to maintain the status quo.

Identifying individual elements worth fighting for and framing them in terms that generate broad emotional buy-in is how incremental progress can continue to be made, even in this dysfunctional moment. Don't get me wrong, we need a lot more than incremental progress, but the cultural shifts we could build in pursuit of a cleaner and more affordable energy future would be part of a much bigger wave, carving out a different path than the one we're on.

This is our moment. Americans became very concerned about the state of our healthcare system when the cost of care began to skyrocket in the early aughts. Americans are now more concerned than ever about the cost of their energy bills rising - now is the time to speak to them directly. Show them solutions that make sense, feel accessible, feel safe.

What's the "pre-existing condition" equivalent for clean energy technologies? A policy concept and argument so simple, so obvious, so emotional, that it becomes cultural dogma? One that can help win fights at the local level and on Capitol Hill? Delivering this solution is the most important thing we could be investing in today.